Year-end Cover2 Musings

I just finished reading a book that I received as a Christmas present from my daughter Lisa and family. The book’s title is Our Boys and it was written by Joe Drape, a New York writer. Drake had spent an entire year in the small Kansas town of Smith Center as he chronicled the season of the local high school football team, the Redmen. The book follows the Redmen as they try to win their fifth straight Kansas 2A state title. If you love the game of football, you will love this book. Those of you who work with kids will undoubtedly see your own players as you read of the great young men who make up the squad of Redmen, and the Smith Center-type coaches can be as close as the mirror. The New York Post calls the book “Hoosiers on a football field”, while the Minneapolis Star Tribune calls the book the most improbable, unabashed love story the reviewer had read in years. My good friend and fellow coach Glenn Smith is from Hutchinson, Kansas, so I will get the book to him tomorrow. I’ll be interested in seeing how many towns and schools he might recognize.

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We went to a Mariner/Skyline basketball game last week and there we ran into two ex-Marauders in the crowd. Nick Wold is the Monroe High School basketball coach, and he was there to get an idea of how his guys might match up against his old school. With Nick was Shane Keck, who had spent the past three years in California coaching football at (I believe) Foothills Community College (I probably got that wrong, but I’m old, so Shane…please give me a break). Shane moved to Washington and is going to follow his friend Nick’s lead and go into teaching and coaching. Shane, however, will concentrate on football, although he could help in basketball as well. These are both great young men who have always displayed the kind of leadership that will ensure their success in life. Nick Wold was, in my estimation, one of the top three quarterbacks to ever play at Mariner, and I am thinking of his leadership qualities as well as an arm strength that belied his size. Only 5’8″ or 5’9″, he could throw a football about sixty yards in the air and on target. His leadership was the type where he was always out in front in sprints saying “follow me”, not on the sideline nursing an imaginary muscle strain saying “you guys go ahead, I’ll catch up”.

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Shane told me that he had read our Cover2 stories, a friend had alerted him to the site’s existence. When he visited the site, he told the friend that he knew that Olsen guy, that I had been his freshman coach, and then he and Nick began re-telling my old war stories. It’s embarrassing to hear those stories coming out of the mouth of young men some ten to fifteen years later…I sounded really stupid. Shane also mentioned that we wrote about a lot of schools that no one ever heard of. That, I told him, is the idea. There are a lot of wonderful stories happening in the six high school classifications in this state as I write this. The big newspapers concentrate on the big-name schools (let’s face it, Skyline and Bellevue don’t exactly have to hunt for publicity), but the game is the same blocking and tackling at all levels from the Sammamish Plateau to Twisp and from Cathlamet to the Tri-cities.

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As Joe Drake says, it’s all about kids working hard, doing the right things, and striving to be better in your life every day. A trio of kids who I have gotten to know well over the past few years are KeiVarae Russell and his friend Ricky Bissinger along with standout linebacker Gabe Dye. These guys really want to be better football players. KeiVarae was the leading scorer on his freshman basketball team, but he wanted to get stronger for football, so he lived in the weight room his sophomore year and this, his junior year, he, Ricky, and Gabe are working to improve their endurance by turning out for swimming. None of these guys have any extra body fat and swimming workouts are legendary, almost brutal, in their difficulty. These guys have to work harder than most swimmers just to stay on top of the water. Their swimming workouts are three hours long, and they almost have to mainline food just to replace the thousands of calories they are burning each day. Why are they doing all this? They simply want to be better football players…they will be. Jim Olsen